Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.

Project Impact

Peggy Sturdivant is on special assignment. She is just barely able to write her weekly column for the Ballard News-Tribune and brush her teeth in addition to her other project. Look for a return to normalcy (and more blog-like posts) in the fall.

The Weight of a House
On a festival-filled, gloriously sunny Saturday in July, I was inside the Greenwood Library learning how to earthquake retrofit a home. While others were strolling Art in the Garden or eating their way through the Bite of Seattle, 10 homeowners were studying the City of Seattle’s project impact home assessment checklist.

There were no food booths or ribbon-cuttings, no mayoral speeches or dancing, just two guys, lots of hand-outs and props that included plywood and power tools. They promised to end the class with “motivational slides,” clearly a euphemism for photographs of homes that weren’t retrofitted in time.

I lived in a wood-framed structure for 21 years in Ballard blissfully unaware of whether my pony wall was bolted to the foundation. Then my life changed. The day that I first allowed myself to look at the For Sale flyer of the 1920 home, one of its neighbors pulled up beside me, her son beside her. “My husband is the listing agent,” she said. “He’s home right now if you’d like to see it.”

I waved my blackberry-picking stained hands and told her we weren’t looking for at least a year, but the woman looked familiar.

“Did you take a writing class with Pesha Gertler?” I asked.

She looked surprised but said that she had taken a class with her many years before.

“You had just had a baby,” I said. We both looked at the tall boy in the passenger seat. “He starts middle school this year,” she said.

Cindy and I are neighbors now because I did finally go inside the house and glimpse a different future. The future looks different at 49 then it did at age 28 when I first stepped inside a Ballard open house. I want this new home to last beyond my lifetime, hence the earthquake retrofitting class.

Tony Holder and Tom Hall started with an introduction to the types of earthquakes the Pacific Northwest might experience, comparing deep quakes (long and gentle by the time they reach us) to crustal faults (short but violent). Then they introduced the ABC’s of retrofitting – anchor, brace, clip or connect. They described pony walls and ductility, yet another new language.

Engaging the male audience with nasty-looking drill bits, Tony and Tom said the first step is determining the weight of a house. Was it framed in wood? Are there bricks or wood siding? Is the roof slate or tiles? Is the attic filled to the gills?

While my live-in engineer began to quiver with the happy prospect of making such calculations and finding the percentage ratio of bolts per perimeter wall, my mind wandered.

I got caught in the shower when the Nisqually Quake hit. I was dressed on my way to my daughter’s school before the chandelier had stopped clanking. Outside the power lines were swaying. My hands on the steering wheel were tingling as though I’d had an electric shock instead of a subduction event.

As a first time homeowner I took water lines, gas, electricity and especially side sewers for granted. I’d never heard of a retaining wall or a chimney cap. For 20 years I continued to carry out recommendations from the initial inspection, lead pipes replaced, foundation clear of the earth, but I never prepared for an earthquake.

As we get older our priorities shift. Why did I put in a new kitchen floor in the old house if the foundation wasn’t even bolted to the pony wall? I took too much for granted.

We tend to picture flattened homes. I never realized that a house is more likely to be sheared off its foundation. Like a Humpty Dumpty it can never really be put back together again, even it does get lifted back onto its foundation wall. Learning about the Puget Sound fault lines and subduction zones didn’t make me more worried; I just wanted to go home and literally weigh my future.

I want to grow old on the front porch like the next to last owner, dispensing candy to the neighborhood children and listening for sea lions and passing trains.

Less than a year after recognizing the neighbor from a writing class we’ve now been neighbors for seven months. Last week we finally had a chance to talk about the class we shared 13 years ago. She took it once; I took it for nearly 10 years, up to three times per year.

Yet she remembered that I used to read to my daughter in the morning. She also remembered an event that I didn’t know we had experienced together.

We were in a classroom at Whitman Middle School. May 2, 1996. A woman read what she’d written from a prompt, “The ground shook…” And then it did. It was an earthquake.

Note: This is a seattlepi.com reader blog. It is not written or edited by the P-I. The authors are solely responsible for content. E-mail us at newmedia@seattlepi.com if you consider a post inappropriate.